Compromise Virtually Assures New Term for Taiwan's Leader

By KEITH BRADSHER

Published: March 30, 2004

TAIPEI, Taiwan, March 29—
The opposition Nationalist Party on Monday publicly dropped its demand that the Taiwan military be allowed to vote again after a disputed presidential election a week ago, making it nearly certain that President Chen Shui-bian will be sworn in on May 20 for another four-year term.

The stock market soared as nine days of political turmoil appeared to have ended with the main political parties reaching an understanding on many, though not all, of the issues that have divided them since a shooting incident involving the president less than 19 hours before the election.

The market jumped 5.6 percent, and would have climbed even higher except that many stocks quickly rose 7 percent, the maximum move up or down allowed in a single day under Taiwan's rules. The currency also rebounded, while the prices of government bonds fell as investors decided that they no longer needed such safe investments.

With another term in office, President Chen is expected to keep trying to increase Taiwan's informal independence from the mainland.

Beijing has said it is most worried not about the next year or two, but about President Chen's possible plans for a constitutional referendum in late 2006 and possibly a new constitution close to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Mr. Chen's Democratic Progressive Party, the Nationalists and the Nationalist-affiliated People First Party reached a rough consensus on Monday to go ahead with a court-supervised recount of the ballots that were cast on March 20, although some questions remain about the precise procedures. Mr. Chen won the initial count on election day by 29,000 votes of 13 million cast.

Completing a recount could take as long as week, because the two sides want judges to supervise the checking of every ballot, as well as voter registration documents and other paperwork.

Su Chi, the senior spokesman for the Nationalists, said his party was no longer pressing to allow another round of voting by members of the military and the police who had been unable to vote because they had been placed on alert after the shooting.

The Nationalists contended that the alert prevented as many as 200,000 people from voting. Mr. Chen and the Defense Ministry replied that the alert had had no effect on voting, because staggered shifts had made it possible for the servicemen and police officers to vote.

The Nationalists accused Mr. Chen of vote rigging but have provided little evidence. The president bitterly denied the charge in a speech on Saturday evening.

Andrew Yang, the secretary general of the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, a nonpartisan research group, said Mr. Chen was certain to win the recount. ''There's no question about that,'' he said.

Mr. Su said that while some officials from the Nationalist Party and the People First Party had publicly called for another round of voting by the military and the police, that had never been a consensus position of the leadership and would not be pursued.

A meeting on Monday of the secretaries general of the Nationalist, People First and Democratic Progressive Parties failed to produce an agreement on when the winners and losers of the presidential election might meet to resolve their differences in person.

Also on Monday, three forensic and ballistics experts from the United States joined the Taiwan government's investigation of the shooting incident. The leader of the group, Cyril Wecht, said in a televised news conference that the team would follow the same criminal procedure techniques that they would pursue in the United States.

Mr. Wecht is an American coroner best known for his contention that President Kennedy's assassination was a result of a domestic conspiracy. Mr. Su said the Nationalists had still not agreed with the Democratic Progressive Party on the precise structure for the investigative task force looking into the incident.

The New Taiwan dollar strengthened by a quarter of a percentage point on Monday -- to 33.194 New Taiwan dollars to an American dollar. The New Taiwan dollar barely fell last week as the central bank intervened to support it, traders said.

Foreign business leaders said Taiwan's image might have benefited from the events of the last week, which indicated that the country's democracy could survive the combination of what is widely described as an assassination attempt and a disputed election in quick succession.

The recent turmoil ''is one of the first really strong tests in the last decade of Taiwan's democracy,'' said Richard Vuylsteke, the executive director of the American Chamber of Commerce here. ''It has been kind of a rocky week or so, but no massed police charges, no burning down buildings and no burning tires in the street. They've gotten through it.''

Kim Sun Bae, a Goldman Sachs economist, agreed that the post-election quarreling had not hurt the economy. ''Nothing fundamental in Taiwan is at risk from an economic recovery point of view,'' he said.